I wish to be like Johny Srouji.

[wry]

I'm a computer engineering student and Apple Silicon is the very thing that inspired me to change my major from computer science to engineering. I heard about how Johny Srouji is in charge of the development of Apple Silicon and how he got really good grades all throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary school and is the brainiac behind the hugely successful Apple Silicon.

Unfortunately I don't have the best grades in college either by virtue of my executive dysfunction or my uni being super difficult and so I probably might be no better than the IBM engineers who failed to deliver on their promises of faster and more power efficient G5 processors that caused Apple to switch to Intel and the Xbox 360 and PS3 to overheat.

But yeah, I have an interest for all things RISC architecture and whatnot. Just getting through the basic foundations of everything before the fun stuff is quite laborious.

 

[altaic]

Don’t worry about your grades. Be passionate and work ethic will follow. School can help interest and impassion you, but mostly it develops habits and work ethic (&friends/networking). ECE is super fun if you let yourself be immersed.

Along those lines, check out some of the RISC-V talks and look at the Belt Architecture for some inspiration. There are also some recent interesting research into machine learning applied to EDA and VLSI— from a CS background, you may find an interest there. Either way, follow free online lectures from top universities— challenge yourself and make time to do so.

Also, read some of Simon Peyton Jones’s papers (and watch some lectures)— somewhat unrelated to ECE, but he knows how to explain a thing, and as Feynman said (paraphrasing), you don’t truly know something until you are able to explain/teach it to someone.

Edit: Just realized I dropped Richard Feynman without any other info— definitely read “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” + “Six Easy Pieces”, and follow that up with anything else Feynman. Also, if you’re wondering about after graduation, read Cryptonomicon for a fun introduction to real life.

Edit #2: Somewhere along the way, also read “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.

 

[satcomer]

Learn to code with Apple! et the skills from horses mouth!

 

[solouki]

...

Edit: Just realized I dropped Richard Feynman without any other info— definitely read “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” + “Six Easy Pieces”, and follow that up with anything else Feynman. Also, if you’re wondering about after graduation, read Cryptonomicon for a fun introduction to real life.

Edit #2: Somewhere along the way, also read “Gödel, Escher, Bach”.

Hi altaic,

You are a person after my heart...

Since you mentioned Feynman's books, I hope you don't mind if I provide a listing with a few short footnotes.

I begin with a Feynman quotation on mathematics from one of his earlier books:

Now some books by and about Feynman, along with a few comments:



EDIT: Too much information, so I removed the bibliography.




And with these references, I finish with another Feynman quote, this time about theories:


Enjoy, Solouki

 

[darngooddesign]

I'm a computer engineering student and Apple Silicon is the very thing that inspired me to change my major from computer science to engineering. I heard about how Johny Srouji is in charge of the development of Apple Silicon and how he got really good grades all throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary school and is the brainiac behind the hugely successful Apple Silicon.

Unfortunately I don't have the best grades in college either by virtue of my executive dysfunction or my uni being super difficult and so I probably might be no better than the IBM engineers who failed to deliver on their promises of faster and more power efficient G5 processors that caused Apple to switch to Intel and the Xbox 360 and PS3 to overheat.

But yeah, I have an interest for all things RISC architecture and whatnot. Just getting through the basic foundations of everything before the fun stuff is quite laborious.

Bear in mind that the Adam Steltzner, the NASA engineer behind Perseverance's sky-crane landing system, also struggled in school. Chin up and keep at it!!!

 

[bobcomer]

I probably might be no better than the IBM engineers who failed to deliver on their promises of faster and more power efficient G5 processors that caused Apple to switch to Intel and the Xbox 360 and PS3 to overheat.

Just a friendly hint, stop thinking like that, or at least stop mentioning that, it does you no good and would be a big downer in an interview -- it would tell me you're inflexible. That was then, this is now.

Anyway, on this particular issue, IBM eventually did deliver on that with the Power series and they are awesome processors, but they are not PC processors, they go in the bigger machines.

 

[StudioMacs]

I'm a computer engineering student and Apple Silicon is the very thing that inspired me to change my major from computer science to engineering. I heard about how Johny Srouji is in charge of the development of Apple Silicon and how he got really good grades all throughout primary, secondary, and post-secondary school and is the brainiac behind the hugely successful Apple Silicon.

Unfortunately I don't have the best grades in college either by virtue of my executive dysfunction or my uni being super difficult and so I probably might be no better than the IBM engineers who failed to deliver on their promises of faster and more power efficient G5 processors that caused Apple to switch to Intel and the Xbox 360 and PS3 to overheat.

But yeah, I have an interest for all things RISC architecture and whatnot. Just getting through the basic foundations of everything before the fun stuff is quite laborious.

Steve Job's reached out to Bill Hewlett (of Hewlett Packard - HP).

 

[JMacHack]

Unfortunately I don't have the best grades in college either by virtue of my executive dysfunction or my uni being super difficult

Let’s turn this thinking around, if it wasn’t a difficult subject, would people need to go to college to learn it?

Also take it from me, passion supersedes good grades anyway. People who care to work and improve will, 100% of the time, get better. That’s what “learning” means.

and so I probably might be no better than the IBM engineers who failed to deliver on their promises of faster and more power efficient G5 processors that caused Apple to switch to Intel and the Xbox 360 and PS3 to overheat.

This is kinda revisionist history.

The AIM alliance (that’s Apple, IBM, Motorola) all were involved with PPC, and Motorola was the ones manufacturing and designing the “consumer” side while IBM designed and manufactured the “server” side.

Motorola fell behind, so Apple went to IBM, which gave them a server chip, not a laptop or consumer desktop chip. Also, we can’t forget about Intels fab lead over everyone, something which they had until 2017! They also had failures in the Itanium and Pentium 4 lineups. Until the “Core” lineup they were lagging behind AMD as well. The POWER architecture continues to this day even, as server processors.

And the processor in the PS3 didn’t have the overheating problems of the Xbox 360, and it wasn’t traditional PPC as well, but a custom Cell design. And let’s not forget that both of these consoles were very successful!

Speaking of successful PPC design, three generations of Nintendo consoles had PPC processors, Gecko in the Gamecube, Broadway in the Wii, and the Wii U, with the Wii becoming the best selling console of all time!

Back to the original topic. Johnny Srouji is a smart guy for sure, but we can’t forget that he has a team of engineers working with him to develop Apple Silicon, as well as at his tenure at Intel.

And he’s had 20 years of chip design by now I think. Who knows how many times he’s screwed up and learned from that? We only know of his successes, and that’s because he’s gotten back up and went back to designing processors.